Talking Power & Kal-El's Companion Core

By Andrew Edelsten, posted Oct 28 2011 at 05:30PM

We are constantly asked by developers, "what's next and where is it?" While Tegra 2 devices continue to release, we are eagerly preparing for what's fast coming down the pipe. At the recent All Things D conference in Asia, NVIDIA's CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, discussed a range of topics including the next generation quad-core Tegra processor codenamed "Project Kal-El."

For the follow-up to the Tegra 2 chip, NVIDIA wanted many things. Of particular interest to our DevZone developers, we wanted more power to usher in the next generation of mobile games and apps, but also wanted to extend battery life in mobile devices. Low power and high performance. A complex balancing act but just the type of challenge NVIDIA is known to tackle. At All Things D, Jen-Hsun briefly explained the Kal-El chip's super low-power fifth CPU core and Variable SMP architecture which were recently revealed.